Call for Code solution starter kit: Clean water and sanitation

Water is the natural resource that is most threatened by climate change, and more than half of the world does not have access to safe sanitation services. Use this starter kit to understand how technology can improve access to clean drinking water, reduce water waste, and protect natural resources. The starter kit provides tools and resources from our experts to help you jump-start your own solution.

Short description

This starter kit can help you begin your Call for Code solution. The starter kit pulls together resources to help you and your team use technology to create applications to tackle clean water and sanitation issues around the world.

What's the problem?

According to the World Health Organization, 2.2 billion people around the world do not have safely managed drinking water services, 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services, and 3 billion people lack basic handwashing facilities. These services are critical in preventing the spread of COVID-19 and other diseases. Even in areas that have these services, there are vast inequalities in the accessibility, availability, and quality of the services.

UNICEF is urgently appealing for funding and support to reach more children with basic water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities, especially those children who are cut off from safe water because they live in remote areas, in places where water is untreated or polluted, or because they are without a home, living in a slum or on the street.

How can technology help?

From intelligent solutions for small farmers to recycling showers, technology can make a significant impact on the availability of water and its consumption. IBM provides various technologies such as IoT, Watson, and blockchain. IBM Water Management as a Service platform can monitor water resources in real time. Through this cloud-based platform, IBM is helping to improve the management of water resources.

Additional ways Water Management as a Service can help:

Creating a database and interactive map to help locate and maintain the water points across the counties
Collecting water usage, breakage, and repair data from boreholes that are monitored by SweetSense
Delivering tickets to repair and maintenance teams who can respond to failures and repair the boreholes

The idea

To encourage optimal water choices by consumers and local governments and to incentivize water sustainability, we propose devising and implementing an API for water data collection and dissemination. With an API, you could have a centralized way to:

Query geolocations of sustainable water sources
Simplify coordination and funding for water construction projects
Explore educational tools to support water sustainability and clean water access
Enable transparent water usage, cleanliness results, and site-to-site comparison
Access plain language case studies and legislation

Solution ideas

This section provides several examples that you and your team can use to jump-start your solution ideas. The following ideas are examples only, so feel free to brainstorm with your team to create your own original ideas and solutions. For example, the 2020 Call for Code Grand Prize winner, Agrolly created a solution that uses IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM Watson Studio, IBM Watson Assistant, and The Weather Company technologies to execute climate risk assessments, which allows farmers with less resources available to them to still make more educated decisions, obtain the necessary financing, and improve their economic outcome.

In the following examples: